Last week, before seeing Aaron Sorkin’s The social balance sheetI was going to write an article about a jaw-dropping sneaky ad that gives Mark Zuckerberg a taste of his own medicine.
The Sony Pictures-produced spot, which you can see here, is the most direct roast of a tech executive — really any executive — that I can remember seeing in a Hollywood marketing piece in a long time. As he teases the Oct. 9 release about Frances Haugen and Facebook files from a half-dozen years ago, he drops the phrase “Mark Zuckerberg will love it.” The social balance sheet.”
And just as you register this and ask yourself, “Is this really true?” ad comes back with “Instagram doesn’t fact-check most ads. Why should we?” This isn’t a simple burn, as the film itself addresses Zuckerberg’s long-standing reluctance to fact-check political ads on Meta’s platforms. Oh and the advertising? It’s running on… Instagram. (There is also a Facebook version that works on Facebook.)
But while I was preparing an article on the subject, I saw the film, attending the world premiere in New York on Sunday evening. And as blunt as the advertising is (we’ll get to that in a moment), the film goes even harder.
In Sorkin’s script, Mikey Madison’s Haugen delivers excerpts from Haugen’s own Senate committee testimony that the company “buys its profits with our safety” (in fact, the film is about “health and safety”) and, in a highly cinematic scene, shows Facebook executives watching what can only be described as disturbing and anger-inducing images of January 6.
There’s also legal counsel criticizing Zuckerberg for “commodification of credulity” and the Facebook founder offering one “we’re just a message board” rationalization after another in a way designed to entice moviegoers to throw unopened pop bottles at the screen. The company tweaks its algorithms to prioritize reshares over likes, knowing full well that ragebait makes up the lion’s share of what gets reshared. Reporting on these topics is well established, in articles by Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (played here by Jeremy Allen White) and many others. But seeing the process consciously and insensibly attempted from the inside will give new impetus to those who are skeptical of social media platforms and might even sway some of the remaining undecided ones.
But the film mostly shoots the moon at Jeremy Strong’s performance, whose Zuckerberg is what would happen if Christof from The Truman Show fell into a vat of acid and emerged as a cross between the Joker and Sheldon Cooper. Straying far from the arrogant but still forgivable character played by Jesse Eisenberg, Strong becomes a villain in his own right, stoically arguing that even the slightest gesture of responsibility is anathema when it comes to money and silencing anyone who might say otherwise.
Not only does he not smile or show any human emotion, Strong’s Zuckerberg seems to treat any gentle note that his site is causing harm as a criminal interruption of ongoing engagement work. (At one point, he is advised during a hearing not to say the words “users” or “humans” because it makes him sound like he is conducting an experiment on his customers. Facebook, of course, did just that.) I never knew it was possible to engage in character defamation through Method Acting, but Strong proved me wrong.
Perhaps what’s most striking is that Sony Pictures, of course itself part of a tech giant, doesn’t bat an eyelid here, not only in releasing the film, but in getting excited about the publicity, which I heard internally before deciding that brazenly delving into the truth was hardly inappropriate for a company that has abdicated its obligations to it. To further double down, Sony dropped the teaser – intentionally – on the same day Meta settled its child harm case filed by multiple attorneys general. Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki apparently even saw the commercial and liked it. The company, of course, isn’t playing in the same sandbox as Meta, but any big company willing to take on a Silicon Valley giant these days is a major anomaly in this oligarchic era of outsized market caps and cozy White House meetings.
We’re living in a strange cultural moment, where Hollywood studios and tech giants are judging each other, each seeking to use its power to shape how the other is perceived. Meta, a week ago, rejected, then reversed course on a commercial for Alex Gibney’s documentary Musk, and now a studio is about to weigh in on Meta.
This is of course not a fair fight, since even at their biggest hits, Hollywood products are viewed in the millions while social media giants measure results in the billions. (In case this power imbalance isn’t clear, Meta recently mobilized some resources to send a threatening legal letter to Sony, “just letting the studio know that Meta has lawyers,” as Sorkin told my colleague Caitlin Huston.)
Perhaps that’s why it’s refreshing that HBO, Bleecker Street and, it now seems, Universal are sticking to their commitments to free Musk, while Neon has stepped in to release OpenAI artificial vivisection when Amazon has suddenly and not-so-mysteriously lost its appetite for doing so.
Haugen testified in the Senate exactly five years ago today. It would be nice to believe that change has come and that Zuckerberg has atoned for past sins. But yes, even though Facebook’s political opposition was turned down and New Mexico’s infamous child exploitation damages ruling gave heart to dozens of other alleged victims, none of us are naive to think that social media is back to play a role in connecting people or mitigating harm. Nor have its platforms experienced the kind of loss one might expect from a Haugen-level whistleblower: Instagram’s user base has actually grew up 25% since Haugen testified. Haugen herself claims that social media itself “might be in a worse situation today than when I leaked the documents.”
Even Meta’s settlement with the attorneys general, which requires changes to teen-oriented features, contains many unknowns and ties some of its actionability to competitors doing the same. Oh, and the advent of Meta’s Muse AI agent will give the company both another engagement tool to use and an added layer of deniability.
Still, the fact that a film is coming out that will get people talking about our relationship with Facebook and Instagram seems significant in itself. As Toby Ziegler and Josiah Bartlett could tell you, the only way to change the world is through a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens.
Gn entert
